Broward County Elections Supervisor Brenda Snipes Is BACK, Rescinds Resignations And Is Lawyering Up

Broward County elections supervisor Brenda Snipes wants her job back and rescinded her official resignation slated for January 4.

Snipes announced her resignation last month after a debacle in the Florida elections. Snipes, who has a history of election scandals, oversaw the election integrity of Broward County, one of three counties who did not submit final voter tallies by the end of election night.

The election board in Broward County then, 48 hours later, had still not submitted how many votes they had left to count. Critics argued the county was adding new votes well after polls had closed and were tipping both the gubernatorial and senatorial elections in the favors of Democrat candidates.

In the senatorial race, Republican candidate Rick Scott—the current Governor of Florida—saw his lead from election night dwindle from more than 57,000 votes to just under 15,000.

As a result, Scott sued Snipes and another county official. He later was declared the winner of the election, after three recounts. Snipes later said she would be resigning from her post in January. Instead of waiting for her resignation, on Friday, Scott suspended Snipes.

Gov. Rick Scott, who won his race for U.S. Senate against Democrat Bill Nelson following a highly publicized election and recount, signed an executive order on Friday ordering Snipes’ removal from office, citing “misfeasance, incompetence and neglect of duty.”

As a result, as BizPac Review reports, Snipes changed her mind about the resignation and is instead lawyering up to contest Scott:

In a stunning announcement Saturday, the scandal-prone Democrat official rescinded her scheduled Jan. 4 resignation and vowed to remain at her post for however long is necessary to defend herself.

Why? To battle Florida Gov. Rick Scott, who had responded to her unexpected resignation by suspending her over her “multiple violations of Florida law, incompetence and neglect of duty.”

“After a series of inexcusable actions, it’s clear that there needs to be an immediate change in Broward County and taxpayers should no longer be burdened by paying a salary for a supervisor of elections who has already announced resignation,” he said in a statement last Friday.

In a statement and a later press conference, Snipes’ attorney Burnadette Norris-Weeks said that her client felt Scott was trying to diminish her long record serving as an election supervisor.

“We believe these actions are malicious, we believe that the allegations that are set forth in the governor’s executive order are done for the purposes of embarrassing Dr. Snipes — embarrassing her and tarnishing her record, and we will be fighting this,” the attorney said, via BizPac Review.

“In addition to that, Dr. Snipes hereby rescinds her resignation that was set forth which would have been effective on the fourth of January.”

“The supervisor is being held to a standard that no other supervisor has been held to in the state of Florida,” Norris-Weeks continued, per Miami Herald. “We are disheartened by the governor’s actions. We believe it is a malicious action that should not have happened.”

“We follow all statutes that are set forward in the state, we take the appropriate kind of training, we have invested in a lot of equipment,” she said. “But there are issues that need to be dealt with in terms of structure — that can be legal structure, it can be the physical structure that we work in.”

“Going forward we hope you’ll stay out there and have an open mind about this whole process,” she said. “That’s really critical in any success we have in dealing with this issue.”